Mayer Rising Festival returns for seventh year

The seventh annual Mayer Rising Community Festival will return to Mayer this Saturday, July 13.

All events will be held at Old Schoolhouse Park and in the Community Center, located at 413 Bluejay Ave. The events get started at 9 a.m. and will wrap up at about 2 p.m.

The highlight of the day, as in past years, will be the fifth annual Mayer Classic Car, Cycle, Truck and Tractor Show, which has grown to become one of the area’s biggest. Last year, the show featured more than 200 vehicles overall, including 185 cars, 14 motorcycles and 32 tractors.

Car show organizer Tom Stifter said the car show has benefited in recent years from having no competition from other nearby shows on the same day. He said that won’t be the case this year, but he’s still hoping for more than 200 cars to once again be a part of the show.

The show runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with awards at 1:30 p.m. There are no entry fees, all cars are welcome, and free car show gift bags will be given to the first 150 entries. Prizes will be awarded for the first, second and third-place entries in each class, as well as a Best of Show. Pre-registration is available at www.mayercarshow.com. As of early this week, there were already 40 cars and four tractors registered, with one vehicle as old as a 1907 Franklin Model G Touring.

For those not interested in cars, a craft fair was added to the festival last year in an attempt to attract a wider range of people. Organizer Krista Goedel said she felt the first year was a big success, and she’s hopeful for an even bigger event this year.

“I think last year was a good success,” Goedel said. “It was busy in terms of the number of people walking through. It was a pretty steady flow, and I think we had 30 vendors, which was a pretty good number for the first year. We’re hoping for a similar turnout in the second year.”

There are once again expected to be more than 30 vendors at this year’s craft show, and Goedel said local business are welcome to have booths as well. Contact Goedel at 952-657-2827 for more information on the fair or space availability.

The craft fair will be located in the Community Center from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

In addition to the car show and the craft show, many of the other festival favorites will be back as well. There will be games for kids, inflatable jumpers, and a kids pedal pull. There will also be plenty of delicious food available for sale.

One of the biggest changes for this year’s festivities is that the annual Beef Sunday baseball game, featuring the Mayer Blazers amateur baseball team and drawings for meat and other prizes, will be moved to Saturday in order to be a part of the festival. Organizers had hoped to make that change last year, but couldn’t get the game re-scheduled. This year, the Beef “Saturday” game will be a doubleheader starting at 1 p.m..